Larry Wood Livres

From pre-Civil War times, through the Old West era, and into the gangster era of the early 1930s and beyond, Greene County, Missouri, has seen more than its share of spectacular crimes. In 1837, the very first murder in Springfield, the seat of county government and the largest city, involved several of the town’s leading citizens. In 1865, just after the close of the war, James Butler Hickok ushered in the era of the Wild West gunfight in America when he shot and killed Davis Tutt on the Springfield public square. In 1886, nationally known temperance revivalist Emma Molloy was implicated in one of the most remarkable criminal cases in Missouri history after a woman’s nude body was found at the bottom of an abandoned well on her property near Brookline. In 1933, notorious gangsters Bonnie and Clyde invaded the county when they kidnapped Springfield motorcycle cop Tom Persell near the Shrine Mosque. In the fall of 1970, Greene County made headlines across the country when a truck driver on strike fired into a dynamite-laden semi west of Springfield on I-44, causing an explosion that blew the driver and his rig to pieces and blasted a huge hole in the highway. Award-winning author Larry Wood chronicles these episodes and over twenty other infamous crimes in Greene County history.

Desperadoes like Frank and Jesse James earned Missouri the nickname of the "Outlaw State" after the Civil War, and that reputation followed the region into the Prohibition era through the feverish criminal activity of Bonnie and Clyde, the Barkers and Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd. Duck into the Slicker War of the 1840s, a vigilante movement that devolved into a lingering feud in which the two sides sometimes meted out whippings, called slickings, on each other. Or witness the Kansas City Massacre of 1933, a shootout between law enforcement officers and criminal gang members who were trying to free Frank Nash, a notorious gang leader being escorted to federal prison. Follow Larry Wood through the most shameful and savage portion of the Show-Me State's history.

Most books written about the partisan warfare in Missouri during the Civil War have focused primarily on Confederate guerrilla leader William Quantrill and his close associates. While Quantrill was the most notorious of Missouri's guerrilla chiefs, he was far from the only one. Other Noted Guerrillas chronicles the lives of over fifteen guerrilla leaders in the state who were not closely allied with Quantrill. The 2015 third edition contains a new chapter on Saline County guerrilla Jim Rider.

It is a joyful day when an infant boy is born into a free roaming tribe of Abnaki Indians residing in Vermont. As the village celebrates little White Eagle's birth, a pair of unfriendly eyes watches from the distance and contemplates how to uproot the friendly tribe from their home. While White Eagle grows up in a loving family, the white man settles closer every day to their village, eventually forcing the tribe to move to a reservation governed by their race. As White Eagle's journey eventually leads to become the one of tribe's best hunters and the next-in-line to become chief, he finds love, marries, and sires a son. But when smallpox takes his family away forever, a devastated White Eagle buries them away from their village. Determined not to abandon them, White Eagle finds refuge from his troubles inside a nearby mountain cave and creates a solitary existence. As years and seasons pass, White Eagle quietly ages without any idea that he is about to finally realize his purpose in the world. In this historical novel, an Abnaki Indian journeys through a challenging existence as he attempts to avoid capture by the white man and bravely confronts his destiny as life comes full circle.

This book details the history of the Ozarks or Tri-State Spook Light. Reaching its peak as a tourist attraction during the mid to late twentieth century, the nightly phenomenon has been drawing the curious to an out-of-the-way spot near the Missouri-Oklahoma border for almost a century. The book also recounts the supernatural legends that purport to explain the strange light, and it chronicles the many scientific and pseudo-scientific investigations into the light's origin. One chapter, called "Close Encounters of the Spooky Kind," relates experiences involving the light that various people have reported over the years, from the unbelievable to the mundane. A separate chapter covers the author's own extensive experience with the light, and the book ends with a discussion of what causes the mysterious light.

"From its territorial days until the late 1930s when executions were moved to the state prison in Jefferson City, the State of Missouri put its official stamp of approval on approximately 300 legal hangings ... In this book, author Larry Wood details 13 of Missouri's more remarkable lynchings and an equal number of its legal hangings."--Back cover.